The Age of Reason is a free Bible study/Christianhistory that shows how and why modernChristianity became apostate.

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THE
HUMAN RACE DIVIDED

God’s people once again managed to
disappoint Him, and He again decided to cut them off and start over with a
third patriarch. But this time He didn’t kill everyone as he had in Noah’s day.
This time He did something no less dramatic, but without the spectacle of
something like a flood. The modern church has forgotten this event in spite of
its uniqueness in human history and in spite of its doctrinal significance.
Just as God divided His kingdom in order to cast out and separate the carnal
angels from the good angels, so He did with Abraham by dividing the human
race in order to cast out and separate the carnal humans from the good
humans. Never again would all humans be God’s people. An unregenerate form of
human now existed that God called dogs and Gentiles. By making only
descendants of Abraham (who were called Hebrews) His people (Ge 17:7,8; Ex 3:7,10; Am
3:2), God made those who were not descendants of Abraham – everybody else
on the planet – not His people (1 Pe 2:10), unregenerate, without spirit life. There had
never been unsaved people on earth before. God’s people had never been a
minority before. The era of the “Fatherhood of God and the Brotherhood of Man”
was over. For the first time in history God’s people were special (Dt 7:6) and peculiar
(Dt 14:2; 1 Pe
2:9) among humans on earth. Special means distinct, different from the
ordinary, extraordinary. And peculiar means distinguished from others,
belonging exclusively to a person, uncommon.

God was starting over with Abraham and
gave him only a partial Old Commission to be fruitful and multiply. I
say partial because God never told His third patriarch or his sons to
“replenish the earth” (Ge 17:2; 26:4; 35:11)
because – unlike with the first two patriarchs – the earth had not been
depopulated. The Bible is always exact and always consistent.

Life would continue normally for Abraham
and his offspring: Just as all people born under Adam and Noah were made
children of God without evangelization, so would all of Abraham’s children be
Christians. But when all the other people on the planet gave birth their
children would be unsaved, they would be unregenerate, they
would not be God’s people. Yes, all of Abraham’s contemporaries continued to have
everlasting life because once they were born of God they were immortal. In
other words, the people who were cast out were not dogs; they were all God’s
Christian children – just like Lucifer and his cast-out brothers. And while most
of these contemporaries of Abraham’s were carnal Christian descendants of Noah
who were disowned by God and went to hell when they died, not all of
these Gentiles were bad Christians. For example, Lot was a Gentile, not a
Hebrew, because he was only Abraham’s nephew (Ge
14:12), but he was a “righteous” and “godly” Christian (2 Pe 2:8,9) – unlike the rest of
Noah’s Christian descendants living in Sodom. But because Lot and the people of
Sodom and the people of the rest of the world were now Gentiles, when they
birthed children God did not give those children the new birth; God now did
that only to children of Abraham. Therefore when the
first generation of Gentiles died off completely, their offspring – future
generations of Gentiles – were all unsaved.

In Ph 3:2 Paul tells us to beware
of dogs (the unsaved, covered in chapters D7 and D8), evil workers
(could be anyone, dog or saint, whose walk is unscriptural), and the concision.
Our English dictionaries say concision means to cut something off or to
mutilate, and Paul here uses it as a derisive reference to circumcised
Christians and Jews who still believe in keeping the law, as evidenced by vv.
4-9,18,19. (Laws and works of the law are covered
in chapters D19 and D20.)

If we use Sodom and Gomorrah as types of
the majority (!) of Noah’s descendants who rebelled against God (Is
1:2,4) and were cast out, then the “very small
remnant” (Is 1:9) God mercifully kept, and the small group of Jews –
called the “holy seed” – that would return to Jerusalem from Babylon (Is
6:1-13; Ezr 9:1,2) can represent Abraham’s
descendants. The Bible also uses Sodom, Gomorrah, potter’s vessels, and pruned
fruit trees (Ro 9:6-8,21-29; 11:1-5,15-20) to warn us that we, too, can
be cast away by God if we don’t remain faithful (Ro 11:21,22; 1 Co 9:27; 1
Ch 28:9; Lk 9:23-25; 2 Ki
17:20; He 6:4-8; 2 Pe 2:4-7). Yes, the branches
our Husbandman Heavenly Father prunes and “taketh
away” and “casts them into the fire” are in Christ the True Vine (“in
me”) according to Jn 15:1,2,6.